Supported Students Graduate: Training For New College Completion Initiative Kicks off in Miami

College completion can be a precarious path for many students, especially those enrolled in community college. Students need support to succeed, and providing this support is the aim of Completion by Design.

College completion can be a precarious path for many students, especially those enrolled in community college. Students need support to succeed, and providing this support is the aim of Completion by Design.

This new initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, imagines a world where community college students receive the support, inspiration and challenge they need to succeed. The partners in Completion by Design aim to prevent loss and increase momentum throughout the college process, from before students set foot on campus to the moment they graduate.

To kick off the planning year of Completion by Design, several of our staff members headed to Miami Dade College for an engagement facilitation training session. The event brought together over 70 participants from each of the CbD community colleges. These participants represented colleges in four different states and ranged from faculty and administrators to financial aid associates and student counselors.

At the end of the training, our goal was to send these representatives back to their campuses, ready to facilitate and record productive and engaging meetings on their campuses about the success of their students.

"People at the beginning felt very confident that facilitation was easy," said Isaac. "They run meetings and head up classrooms on a regular basis. Yet what we heard is that they found true facilitation to be much more complex than what they had anticipated, and they were eager to continue to learn more."

Challenges to meaningful, authentic and comprehensive facilitation abound. Ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to speak, remaining neutral, balancing competing perspectives, dealing with time constraints and addressing some deeply and personally important issues are just some of the skills the facilitators worked to develop at this training.

Following the training, the representatives headed back to their campuses prepared to facilitate, throughout the next year, internal discussions with faculty, administration, student services and others about the challenges behind college completion, focusing especially on preventing loss and improving momentum. By encouraging these discussions, community colleges will determine where they are losing students and work to fix these loss points.

"The exciting thing," said Jyoti, "is that the energy around facilitation and the local and campus capacity building this training provided can be applied to any student success effort going forward in the future."